Page 11 of The Murder Between Us
As he neared the open door to the last bedroom on the right, Venneslund removed his Stetson and held it against his chest. Camera flashes flickered out of the bedroom door. Soft murmurs spilled into the hall. “In there,” Venneslund mumbled. “It’s him,” he growled as Noah passed. “And youknowthis isn’t the first one.”
The smell hit Noah as he crossed the threshold. Victims of strangulation always smelled the worst. It was an insult added to injury, a degradation after the fact. The stench of panic leaching out of the victim during their slow, terrible final moments, combined with the body’s reflexive last voiding at the time of death, led to a particularly foul residue. It stained the molecules that hung in the room, coated the air in an oily residue that covered the tongue and the back of the throat. The stench of terror, and horror, and death.
It was the stench left behind at each of the Coed Killer’s murders.
It hit him hard, and Noah froze just inside the door, dizzy. His eyes closed, and a kaleidoscope of murders flashed behind his eyelids. Pretty young women, college students, every one of them smiling and happy and looking forward to her future, the long years of their lives stretching before them. Each of them dead. Murdered and then thrown away, discarded carelessly, forgotten as soon as their deaths had served the killer’s needs.
He’s back.
A crime scene tech bumped Noah’s shoulder as she squeezed around him, taking another photo of the corpse on the bed. Noah shifted, giving her room, and then stepped closer and leaned over the body of Jessie Olson, Bart Olson’s daughter. Her sightless eyes stared at the ceiling, salt lines from dried tears dusting her cold cheeks. Dark, angry bruises dug into her throat, the clear outline of fingers and two palms wreathing her neck. Her head was tilted unnaturally, as if something had come undone inside her. She was lying on her back, sprawled half on the bed, one foot still on the floor and the other dangling off the mattress. Her hands were open, carelessly flung sideways.
Her nightstand was toppled, a lamp on the floor. Noah looked from the door to Jessie’s bed in the corner. He could picture the attack, the killer getting his hands around Jessie’s throat and pushing her through the room, throwing her on her bed and squeezing—
He looked away, to Jessie’s walls. They were covered in awards, certificates and ribbons and photographs from 4-H and the FFA and Girl Scouts. Jessie had made a name for herself in the local ag scene. She was an accomplished young woman, showing prize animals at the state fair and local shows and collecting awards for years. At last year’s holiday party, Bart had bragged about Jessie’s straight As in her agricultural science major at Iowa State. Bart had been so happy, just six months ago.
Jessie, too, if the newspaper clipping from three months before tacked to her wall was any indication. Her smile stretched from ear to ear, like Julia Roberts’s, so big and wide it was like an Iowa horizon at sunrise. Her long, straw-blonde hair was loose around her round, open face dotted with freckles over her nose from long days in the sun. “Local Sheriff’s Daughter Awarded Top Honors,” the headline read.
He’s back.
Accomplished, beautiful young women, successful in their college and university programs, had always been the Coed Killer’s targets.
Noah hung his head. Years before, he’d been tapped to join the joint task force hunting the Coed Killer. Local law enforcement from Des Moines, West Des Moines, and Polk, Dallas, Warren, and Story Counties, along with the FBI—Noah—had trailed after the serial killer for eighteen months. He left no forensics. No footprints. No trail. He appeared out of the shadows, stole a young life, and disappeared without a trace.
The helplessness had nearly suffocated them all, the ache in their souls when they couldn’t track the killer beyond the crime scene tape enough to choke on. Noah had never felt so helpless, so worthless. And it wasn’t just him. One of the Polk County deputies had hurled his laptop against the wall, four murders in with no leads and after they’d all received another callout to come to the scene of yet another murdered young woman.
The night of Stacy Shepherd’s murder at Iowa State University, a young couple, graduate students walking their dog near campus after dark, had been gunned down, shot and killed after neighbors reported the husband, Kyle Carter, had shouted for someone to stop. No one had seen what happened, but neighbors said they’d heard Kyle bellowing, sounds of running, Shelly screaming, and then four gunshots. Their dead bodies were found in the street, their golden retriever running in circles in a neighbor’s yard, barking its head off.
Years passed. There were no more killings. A theory developed that Kyle and Shelly had interrupted the Coed Killer escaping after murdering Stacy Shepherd. They’d confronted him slinking through the neighborhood that bordered the Iowa State dorms. Had the killer been injured? There was no indication he’d been wounded, no defensive wounds on Kyle or Shelly. No blood, other than their own. No forensics on the street or in the yards up and down the block. They never found the gun that fired the bullets. There had been nothing other than circumstance. Stacy’s body, the neighbor’s reports of Kyle confronting someone, running footsteps. And then the Coed Killer’s disappearance.
Did being sighted spook him? Had he uprooted or gone to ground?
After all this time, why was he back now?
You know this isn’t the first one.
Three months earlier, Kimberly Foster, a sophomore at Faith Baptist, had been killed in her home. Strangled. The police were investigating her boyfriend, an obsessive fellow student at the college, someone she had complained to the dean about several times. She was requesting a restraining order, had it in her purse to file with the court, when she was killed.
What had seemed like the tragic but foreseeable outcome of the dean’s inaction and failure to take assertive steps was now cast in a new light. She had been the captain of Faith’s women’s volleyball team, a team that had swept its division and gone on to dominate the playoffs and win the championship. Her photo had been in the local paper. She’d been interviewed about her leadership, how she led the team through the season. Copies of the articles were on the walls of her stalker’s apartment, a printout of her photo in his wallet.
But…
Noah made his way out of Jessie’s bedroom and wound through the farmhouse and back out to the porch. Venneslund had joined Andy at his vigil over Bart Olson’s corpse, one hand on Andy’s shoulder as Andy’s jaw clenched and unclenched. Venneslund stared at the ground, shaking his head.
Noah peeled off his blue gloves and shoved them in the pocket of his khakis. His receipt from the cab to the airport that morning was still in the same pocket.Vegas. No, he couldn’t think about that now. Not anymore. Maybe not ever again.What happens in Vegas.
He fished his phone out and dialed his boss, Special Agent in Charge of Des Moines John Hayes. Hayes was three years from retirement, winding down a thirty-five-year career that had started in New York City and was ending in West Des Moines. He’d requested the transfer to the Midwest from Detroit ten years earlier, getting surprised with Des Moines but making the best of it. He’d taken Noah under his wing when Noah was still young and green and trying to find his feet.
“How’s it look, Noah?” John asked, answering on the first ring.
“It’s him. He’s back.”
John cursed. “And the Faith Baptist girl? Do you think she’s connected?”
“We have to very seriously consider it. The MO is too similar.”
“Why would he reappear now? After six years? Could this be a copycat?”
Noah chewed on his bottom lip, staring at the horizon. It felt like the Coed Killer. At least, it did with Jessie, in her bedroom. What happened to Bart… “This feels like him. Jessie, she was—” He swallowed. “She was the same as the others. The exact same. Even things we didn’t release to the press.” No sexual assault, for one. The Coed Killer never touched the girls, despite what the media lasciviously reported. Noah stared at the cornfield neighboring Bart’s property. Thigh high by July was what they said about corn. The golden heads of the stalks were already up to Noah’s eyes. It would be a good harvest. “It’s him.”
